VMworld 2015 Europe – Our Perspective

VMware have taken further advances toward bringing every aspect of the traditional datacentre into their already established and powerful hypervisor. And we’re right there with them.

Throughout the last decade, VMware’s virtualisation layer has enabled Instant On IT to succeed at offering highly available, readily scalable, and secure foundations to all our datacentre services. Remote access to file, email and business applications is made possible by delivering them from our secure private cloud. We also make disaster recovery and backup services between on-premise and datacenter locations ‘just work’, ensuring business continuity and radically reducing recovery times.

This year sees the maturity of the VMware VSAN offering, with added features that convince us to move from our internal proof of concept storage deployments to production environments, adding super-fast flash storage to the underlying architecture that delivers client services. Once again Instant On IT are using cutting edge technology to ensure our platform offers the agile scalability that clients have come to expect.

My visit to Barcelona in 2014 gave us technical insights into the NSX product, derived from the acquisition of Nicira. This technology has been developed to virtualise the datacentre network – a concept many people at the 2015 conference still find mind-boggling, and that’s before presenters offer their forward-looking future possibilities to a wide-eyed audience. VMware still have the edge when it comes to game-changing ideas, and successfully delivering to industry.

In its current version, NSX gives us far more in-depth control over the security of all individual machine network connections in the datacentre, driven by powerful policy-based management. Implementing this level of granular control without NSX would be prohibitive to all but the largest banks and healthcare organisations. In fact, some of the largest customer case studies come from these and many other verticals, including some of the biggest names. Anti-virus and malware filtering is also made more thorough in ways totally impossible using traditional solutions.

NSX and VSAN now feature at the core of the VMware stack. This ensures that we’re always able to provision new services in just a few clicks and, equally importantly, we can deliver new products in an integrated and seamless fashion. AirWatch, for example, for mobile device management makes BYOD a breeze. The integration of Microsoft Azure and Amazon AWS public clouds into any of our client-hosted private clouds makes for a more feature-rich user experience. Stretched storage clusters across metro and national areas allows the provision of increased data storage capacity and high availability, meeting local and European compliance requirements at much reduced cost and complexity.

Attending a technical conference does more than give the vendor and its partners an opportunity to ply you with beer and pitch their new sales ideas. Not only do we walk away with new tools and real technical insights into how the future of IT will affect us all, but also confidence that we’re running the best platform for our clients; we’re well ahead of many in-house teams and outsourcing partners in Europe’s IT industries.

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